IE really is the best browser ever…if you’re into puzzle solving.
On the Baker Associates home page I have included an image fader. It’s a simple one that using the JQuery Cycle plugin (a good plugin that I would highly recommend and whose involvement in this bug is purely incidental).
I’ve fixed it now but previously white spots were appearing in the images as they faded when viewing on Internet Explorer. Between fades the images looked fine. A little rummaging on the web shows that this is a common problem caused by Internet Explorer’s image filters which sometimes treat pure black (#000000) as transparent.
There are a few ways around it. The simplest is to put a black div behind the images. You may notice there’s still one on the Baker Associates site. It didn’t help in my case but I thought I’d leave it there as it can’t do any harm.
The other, more annoying way is to replace any pure-black pixels with pixels of very, very dark grey. You can do this easily in Photoshop by going to Image > Adjustments > Replace Color. Or in GIMP by going to Colors > Map > Color Range Mapping (apparently).
I was having this problem on IE8. I’m not sure if they’ve fixed it in 9 and I can’t be bothered to find out but I doubt they have.
Here’s some link love for the people who knew the answer:
Alex Judd – Stack Overflow
Update 26/7/2011: Aaaarg! It’s still doing it!
